The particles 呢 (ne) and 吗 (ma) are extremely common in Chinese. This article
explains the two particles for beginners.
呢 and 吗 are similar in the following ways:
- Both go at the end of a sentence.
- Both of them can form questions.
- Both of them are pronounced in neutral tone.
But these two particles have different uses:
- 吗 is used to turn statements into yes-no questions.
- 呢 is mostly used to turn statements into queries (amongst other things).
Now let’s look at the two particles in detail.
吗 (ma)
As mentioned above, 吗 is a question particle that is used to turn statements
into yes-no questions. What exactly does that mean? A yes-no
question is also known as a “binary question” or a “polar question”. This simply
means that it’s a question that can only be answered with “yes” or “no”. In
other words, it’s not an open question.
The question particle 吗 is the easiest way to form this kind of question in
Mandarin Chinese. All you do is put it on the end of a plain statement, and the
statement becomes a yes-no question. Have a look at some examples:
Those would all be valid sentences without 吗. They would just be plain
statements:
Compare the two sets of sentences. You can see that when 吗 is added on the end,
they become yes-no questions. All of those questions can only be answered with
agreement or disagreement. That’s what 吗 is for.
In this way, 吗 is almost like a question mark that you say out loud. It goes on
the end of the sentence and indicates that it’s a question. Have a look at some
point statements being changed into yes-no questions with 吗:
Notice how in English you have to re-arrange the word order of the sentence to
form these questions. In Chinese, all you have to do is add 吗 on the end.
呢 (ne)
The particle 呢 has more uses than 吗, but we’ll look at the most important one
here: forming queries, or asking bounce-back
questions.
The most common use for 呢 is probably to form simple queries. All you do is put
呢 after the thing you want to query. This is often equivalent to saying “and
… ?”, “what about … ?” or “how about … ?” in English. Some examples:
As you can see, it’s very easy to query things in Chinese using 呢. Just say the
thing you’d like to know about, and put 呢 right after it. This is very
commonly used to ask ‘bounce-back questions’ in Chinese. This is when someone
asks you a question, and you return the question to them after answering it.
This is commonly done by simply asking “你呢？”.
There are a few other uses for 呢 in Chinese grammar, but we won’t go into
detail about those in this article.
Comparing 吗 and 呢
As you can see above, these two particles are fairly similar. But what are the
important differences? Let’s have a look at a few here.
The first difference is that 吗 is only for yes-no questions,
whereas 呢 cannot be used in yes-no questions. 吗 always forms
these questions, whereas when 呢 is used to form queries, they are open-ended.
The second difference is that 呢 can combine with question
words to emphasize a query. 吗 can’t be doubled-up with other question
words; it marks questions on its own. For example, 呢 is being used to add a
further querying element to these questions:
Those would both be grammatically valid questions without 呢, but by adding 呢
the speaker makes it clear that they don’t just want an answer to the question -
they’re questioning the situation or even criticising it. They’ve added
a further query to it.
吗, on the other hand, can’t combine directly with other question words in a
statement. If there’s already a question word, it fills up the question “slot”,
and there’s no more space for 吗.
The only way 吗 can appear with other question words in the same sentence is if
it’s used to ask a yes-no question about a condition. That
sounds complicated, but this example might make it clearer:
吗 is appearing with another question word (为什么) in that sentence,
but it’s not actually part of that question. There are two questions in
the sentence here: an inner question about why the person doesn’t eat
meat, and an outer question about whether the listener knows the answer
to the inner question:
吗 really only applies to the outer question, so it doesn’t clash with the
question word in the inner one. Other than that kind of situation, 吗 can’t
appear directly together with other question words.
See also